South Africa's health minister has rejected his British counterpart's claim that a new coronavirus variant in the country is more contagious or dangerous than a similar one in spreading the UK. "At present, there is no evidence that the 501.V2 (variant) is more transmissible than the United...

President Donald Trump's pardons of five people from his 2016 election campaign caps his effort to bleach out the stain on his tenure of the Russia interference investigation. The US leader never accepted the conclusions of US intelligence and special counsel Robert Mueller that Moscow...

Hong Kong extended its compulsory quarantine to three weeks for almost all international travellers from Friday, saying the measure was needed to prevent new, more infectious, coronavirus variants from spreading. The government said expert advice suggested that the incubation period of the...

As winter approaches and the covid-19 pandemic intensifies throughout the Middle East, Syrian refugees face parallel threats of bitter cold, coronavirus outbreaks in refugee communities, and economic hardship because of widespread lockdowns. Today, after nearly a decade of war, more than 5.5...